This invention relates to the organization of and access to information stored in a computer system.
Computer systems frequently organize data into categories, usually called fields, each category having a number of items of information. The categories can be arranged in a hierarchical structure such that each category may include a "parent" category, one or more "sibling" categories, and one or more "children" categories. For example, a category called "Companies" may have as its children the categories "Financial Information" and "Personnel", and Personnel could have "Name", "Address" and "Salary" as its children. In this example, Financial Information and Personnel are sibling categories since they both have the same parent category, i.e., Companies. Similarly, Name, Address and Salary are siblings with Personnel as the common parent. The category hierarchy can continue to many levels or "generations."
Items are specific textual information such as a single word or several lines of text. Items appear in fields (i.e., under one of the available categories). Using the above example, the names of specific companies would appear under the category Company. Similarly, specific names of employees are under the category Names.
Prior art systems generally operate in two distinct modes, a data entry mode and a report writer or view mode. As its name implies, the data entry mode is used when data is to be entered, deleted or modified in any way. The user directly accesses the files in the data base and makes the desired changes.